Grants talk:IdeaLab/Comprehensive harassment and privacy policy

Summary of issues for improvement

• More neutral language for all gender orientations. √
• Connect with Terms of Use. √
• Better description of problematic nudity √
• Tie to discrimination policy √
• Gender neutral descriptions of harassment √
• Sync terminology with partner institutions
• User flag for offensive edits

See Grants:IdeaLab/Community discussion on harassment reporting

Needs to discuss relationship with existing Terms of Use

This is a great proposal, but it needs to mention what is covered by the existing Terms of Use (see in particular [1]), why that is inadequate, and how those inadequacies will be fixed. I would also suggest discussing the need for better channels for privately reporting harassment, since people don't always want to report harassment publicly (for obvious reasons). Kaldari (talk) 23:40, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kaldari Thanks. Are you talking about the "engaging in harassment"? section of the Terms of Use? Yes, I remember someone asking who was responsible for enforcing the Terms of Use, clearly Arbcom doesn't do it. Is it not in their remit, or are they just not trained to do it?

Hm, what are the "obvious reasons". I suspect my obvious is not the same as your obvious. Most places will require you to say something directly to the person harassing you before you can make a formal complaint, and is normally included in a boilerplate HR policy like this, but I have left it off of this proposal, mostly because of my personal experience with Arbcom. —Neotarf (talk) 01:48, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Arbcom's core remit is dispute resolution. So most harassment is not in their remit, it is a matter for the community and especially admins. Arbcom should get involved when the community can't agree whether something is harassment or when the harasser is an admin aand there is a case for Arbcom to desysop them. Also remember we have over a thousand Wikis and very few have Arbcoms, but they all have admins, either locally or they are covered by global sysops. So if you want a global policy I'd suggest you want admins enforcing it. WereSpielChequers (talk) 21:08, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Admins and arbcom are subject to politics and elections; what is needed is an entity that is above politics, and answerable only to the policy. In addition, public wrangling over privacy, discrimination, and harassment defeats the purpose. Violations need to be removed quickly and quietly, by someone with the authority to do so. —Neotarf (talk) 23:56, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

You can't be answerable to a policy. You can only be answerable to a person or some people. If you empower an unaccountable group of people to enforce their interpretation of a policy then the results will not be good. Especially when multiple languages and cultures are involved and you are dealing with a volunteer community who prefer fairness and accountability. WereSpielChequers (talk) 06:06, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

50/50 gender balance

Should this not be expanded to representation by all gender orientations (unsure of the correct terminology here) to the extent that there is no one group which has a majority? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:42, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

What would you suggest? I don't mean to be exclusionary, but the grant campaign is specifically about women. The concept I took from the title of the article "Getting to 50/50: What’s in It for Men?", which is about engaging men around women's leadership. There have also been some materials linked to on the mailing list, which indicates that having just one woman on a board or committee does not lead to improved outcomes for women, there must be a critical mass. IMO it is crucial to seek this representational mass on the committees themselves, and not have them dominated by men. The privacy and harassment issues related to gender are meant to apply to all. —Neotarf (talk) 16:34, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

I thought my suggestion was fairly clear, but will try to explain why I made it. When there are two groups, people tend to take sides and the majority group tends to assert dominance. When there are three or more groups, none having a numerical or power majority, it is more likely that they will stick to business instead of playing dominance games. Also I would prefer to see more orientations represented in a team tasked with dealing with harassment than the traditional two. With more orientations represented it is more likely that privacy and harassment issues will be handled without bias. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:20, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Do you have any statistics on that, or an example from an HR department that is sensitive to those issues? The last survey I remember, I have seem something around 1% on en.wp identify as trans. This proposal bypasses the issue of "dominance"; it takes the issue out of the hands of "groups" and out of the public eye. The material is simply removed, according to predetermined criteria, and without public debate. Hopefully there will eventually be an invisible flag to report these edits, as there is on websites like Metafilter and YouTube, or like the "thank" button on en.wp. Sexual harassment is sexual harassment, it doesn't matter who is being harassed. It needs to be stopped with as little drama as possible. —Neotarf (talk) 00:08, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

I have no statistics, does anyone? I would be interested to see them if they exist. It is my personal opinion, and may be valid or not. Do you have any evidence/statistics to support the 50/50 proposal, but that do not support a more inclusive representation and avoidance of a single group majority? I base my hypothesis on my observation of the workings of two-party states versus multi-party states, particularly those which form coalition governments, as opposed to one-party states and those with overwhelming majorities. Two party systems tend to polarize issues into us vs them. With more viewpoints the issues themselves may be given more attention. You appear to be proposing a group who would be performing almost totally non-transparent actions. No explanation required. Or perhaps I misunderstand? You have some way of ensuring that the persons appointed to this group are above suspicion? Who would they be answerable to? How would their actions be shown to be fair and just? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:46, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Editing Anonymously

Re: "One way for women to avoid harassment is to edit anonymously. The WMF privacy policy upholds this. However, there is no group that understands this and is willing to enforce the policy." I was tempted to add a citation needed tag to this, do you have any evidence of anyone here not understanding this and trying to get editors to disclose their gender? My experience on the English Wikipedia is that plenty of editors don't disclose their gender and I can't remember ever coming across someone trying to make another editor disclose their gender. Though I appreciate there are other languages where it is difficult to comment on talkpages without disclosing your gender.WereSpielChequers (talk) 06:39, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Oh, yes, but any details would have to be by email. I have always edited anonymously and have consistently asked people to remove any gendered pronouns they have used in reference to me, whether male or female. Most people are happy to change their edits, but what if they don't? Can you tell me who I can turn to, to have private information removed? —Neotarf (talk) 16:47, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

On the English Wikipedia "Suppression removes edits which breach privacy or defame somebody." - my emphasis. What I don't know is whether the oversighters would consider a guess of someone's gender to be private info. I suspect the relevant policy would be "2 Clearly private, personal, or non-public information." and that gender would fall into the area of individual oversighter discretion. I don't know how other projects would handle this, and in some cultures the idea of keeping your gender private may be an alien concept - especially when the language defaults to disclosing your gender in every talkpage comment. You could do something concrete with this proposal and audit the 286 language versions of mediawiki and the thousand wikis to see which ones if any require people to state a gender, or worse, if any default editors to male unless they opt to be treated as female. But in cultures where you speak with either male or female words I'd hesitate to impose a change without native speakers supporting it. WereSpielChequers (talk) 20:39, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, gender is specifically considered to be private information when associated with user account, see the definitions here. Of course not everyone will wish to be anonymous, some do prefer to edit with their real names. —Neotarf (talk) 01:00, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

I second this opinion. Please bear in mind that singular they exists only in English, thus in languages where pronouns change depending on the gender one can only say Neotarf did not disclose his/her gender (which is already a bit weird). In addition, in some languages the noun user has gender, in some languages adjectives have gender of the noun, in some languages verbs have different forms depending on the gender etc. Actually in some languages even the phrase I did not disclose my gender sounds differently depending on the speaker's gender. Of course you can write I did not disclose-male (did not disclose-female) my gender, but your chances to enforce this are very low. However, in these cultures people will feel very sorry if they used a wrong pronoun and will most likely change it immediately. Thus I do not think that disclosing one's gender can be a violation of the privacy policy (except if a user clearly opposes to disclosing their gender). If you want to learn more about it, you can go to translatewiki.net and see how localisation depends on gender in many languages — NickK (talk) 22:55, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing this up. It is an easy concept for English Wikipedia, but the international enforcement takes some thought. Still, I think it is even more important for the non-English wikis to respect the WMF policy, especially since there are so many repressive governments in the world, and we want our users to be as safe as possible. This study, for example, showed that 87% of users in the U.S. could be matched to a data base with nothing more than their zip code, sex, and birth date. Just think what that might mean for someone in a smaller country, or for someone who was editing in a language that was not the main language of the country they were in. Terrible things have happened to people for their edits, for example Raif Badawi, Hamza Kashgari Abdullah al-Hamid, Mohammad al-Qahtani, along with their attorney who disappeared, also the journalist Iman al-Qahtani who has disappeared. I'm sure there are many more.

The WMF has a privacy policy, and it has a policy against sexual harassment; let us think of ways to make it work.

Different languages have different ways of dealing with gendered pronouns, this is true. Hungarian for example has no gendered pronouns, while Argentinian Spanish does have "vos" for "singular they". I don't think the policy can specify how to do this for every language. "His/her" may seem a bit weird, true, also "s/he" or "he or she". Some think "they" is weird, or at best, too informal. We have to do the best we can with the language we have, we cannot sacrifice our editors for the sake of sounding nice. The English Wikipedia has a Manual of Style (MOS) to help with these choices, perhaps other language wikis already have guidance for this, if you check the various translations at the English MOS. —Neotarf (talk) 00:49, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Just to be clear, zip code and birth date are still enough for identifying people, as zip codes and birth dates already reduce the field of search greatly, although the result will be smaller than 87%. Any other information instead of gender (e.g. zip code, date of birth and place of birth) can perhaps give you even better result than 87%, so the issue is not with gender but with amount of private information published. Same for Raif Badawi and others: I doubt their problem is due to the fact someone knew their gender, but perhaps due to the fact they disclosed some of their private information online.

It's really necessary to fight both privacy violations and sexual harassment, but please do not state by default that users refuse to disclose their gender, as this will be incorrect in many communities (although it's fine to consider it as such for users who publicly refused to disclose their gender).

Hungarian and Estonian are two examples of generless languages where users do not need to know gender for grammar purposes. A counter-example is Basque where even the phrase "I am a Wikipedian" will sound differently if you are writing to a male or to a female (a gender-neutral form does exist however). Apart of these cases one usually has two options: a "male" word and a "female" word. Using a male word for a female is sexist, and using a female word for a female discloses their gender. This is not really a great choise for users, so they naturally prefer to find the gender of a person in question to avoid a mistake, and honestly I don't think there should be a punishment for that — NickK (talk) 02:01, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Women have to fight for the respect so they’re not harassed in a forum? One way of putting up with it and saying it’s ok I don’t want to deal with it is to post anonymous. No. It requires integrity and strength but you don’t hide or remain quiet so that a harasser thinks it’s ok. Nah In this new commie based Wiki it’s harf to find anything but lies to keep the masses sedate but it’s better to fight wrong even if that means giving your life. That’s the American way. Ban me. Report me. This is disgusting. Denying Hitler. What about Stalin? All of them? You WANT to control and dictate. The truth will be told.

Nudity

Having "Images of nude women" in Examples of sexual harassment is overly simplistic. There are plenty of work environments outside Wikipedia where you could have such a simple rule as the only images you need to consider are in the "girlie calender"s you want to stop men hanging in the workplace and any porn that people are illicitly looking at when they should be working. But Wikipedia is more akin to many of our GLAM partners, a place where one would expect to come across images of nudity, whether in political articles such as en:Femen, or in some medical articles or of course in art. Of course a policy on harassment needs to have something on inappropriate nudity, but much like a museum whose exhibits include some nude statues, we need a more nuanced policy as to when images of nude women constitute sexual harassment than simply citing "Images of nude women" as harassment. WereSpielChequers (talk) 07:04, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Sure, those were examples, and of course you have to deal with adult subjects in the course of normal editing. I originally wrote "displaying suggestive material such as pornographic photos", which is not quite it either. But I have seen people in a dispute with women intentionally leave a link to an image of genitalia as a part of the conversation, or start dropping gender-specific slurs, or even start an "academic discussion" about the meaning of sexually offensive terms whenever they know there are women on the thread. Do you have any suggestions for a better wording? Surely someone has dealt with this problem before. I'm thinking there needs to be a flag as well, for users to flag offensive edits. —Neotarf (talk) 17:05, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

The anti-harassment policy on the Geek Feminism wiki's addendum may be useful here, particularly points (b) and (c). http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Example_exception_to_policy --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

...

Discussion or images related to sex, pornography, discriminatory language, or similar is welcome if it meets all of the following criteria: ... (b) it is necessary to the topic of discussion and no alternative exists, (c) it is presented in a respectful manner, especially towards women and LGBTQIA people, ... This exception specifically does not allow use of gratuitous sexual images as attention-getting devices or unnecessary examples.

That sums it up nicely, although I'm not so sure of all the capital letters. Any idea of the copyright status of this? Can this be used as it is? —Neotarf (talk) 23:10, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

What's wrong with using the principle of least astonishment? As far as I'm concerned it should rule out all three of the scenarios that you mention. If people "intentionally leave a link to an image of genitalia as a part of the conversation, or start dropping gender-specific slurs, or even start an "academic discussion" about the meaning of sexually offensive terms" then in most instances you would be covered by that policy. Of course there are articles on gender specific slurs and you would legitimately expect to have discussion of those slurs on their talkpages, and I can think of at least a couple of vested contributors whose talkpages might veer into the second and third examples. But my suggestion would be that where we have an enforcement problem, stick to asking people to enforce an underenforced policy. Outside sites are great for where you want to argue for a change of policy and you can point to another site which has tried and tested the policy you want. But if you already have policy on your side then why not use it? WereSpielChequers (talk) 20:23, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

This isn't about content, it's about user interactions. It really has to be spelled out or some people just won't get it. This is pretty standard HR stuff. This kind of employee training has been around for years, the concepts just have to be fitted to cyberspace. —Neotarf (talk) 22:40, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I think we agree it shouldn't be about content, and should be about inapproriate user behaviour, but since we do have "adult" content you really need to have it spelled out in your proposal and in any subsequent policy that there are certain talkpages such as articles about human genitalia where it would be legitimate to discuss which image to use to illustrate that part of human genitalia. A standard HR approach won't work here because unlike most organisations we do have talkpages where it is legitimate to discuss subjects that most HR departments could simply ban. Unless you change the proposal to focus on inappropriate user interactions you will have people opposing this as an attempt to bowdlerise the pedia or worse. This is especially a hot topic amongst GLAMs where there is professional embarassment that past generations of curators vandalised exhibits by replacing human genitalia with fig leaves. WereSpielChequers (talk) 08:09, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

This is not at all incompatible with basic HR practices. Think of hospitals, for instance. There is nudity all over the place, it is necessary for examinations, but you would never expect your doctor to be naked, or to see naked people running down the halls. I rather like the criteria presented above: "1) it is necessary to the topic of discussion and no alternative exists, (2) it is presented in a respectful manner, especially towards women and LGBT people." —Neotarf (talk) 01:11, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

My only concern about that wording is that it is an unnecessary complication when we already have similar policy that we could quote. But more importantly, you see my point that the proposal as written "Images of nude women" needs to be expanded? WereSpielChequers (talk) 07:18, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

I have added the language suggested above to the proposal. —Neotarf (talk) 21:46, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Sexual harassment does not just apply to women

Sexual harassment can affect people of both genders and varying sexual preferences, so I would like to see the proposal carefully phrased to indicate this, and avoid implying that it is only a problem that affects women. Thanks! I AM SO GLAD TO SEE SOMEONE BRINGING THIS FORWARD; If anyone wants to see an institutional example of a policy, I can provide one from my workplace. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 14:37, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Please do. As you can see, there is a lot of discussion about how to tweak the wording. It would certainly be useful to see the sort of language used by an institution whose users collaborate frequently with Wikipedia, and what kind of work environment they have come to expect. —Neotarf (talk) 17:18, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

How would the group tasked with enforcement be appointed?

This is an important aspect which is not clear. I would not wish to see people with political agendas or chips on their shoulders appointed to deal with this problem, and those tend to be the most likely people to want to get onto the committee, or to be voted in by their followers. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:29, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I second this question. The idea sounds promising as harassment is a problem that is not always appropriately managed, but such group looks like a dream. There are several points about this group:

• It must be trusted by literally everyone in the movement, as it will be above all elected positions like administrators, arbitrators, stewards, ombudsman commission and WMF board members.
• It must be perfectly multilingual, as it will receive harassment reports in over 200 languages and it should be able to understand whether there was a harassment or not (which is nearly impossible for people who are not native speakers, as harassment often contains words or cultural references that cannot be found in dictionaries)
• It must be completely neutral as harassment can be not only sexual, but also political, religious, ethnic etc., thus members of these group should have no political agenda or views.
• It must be absolutely transparent, as decisions need to be explained way better than those from Report Abuse functions in Facebook or YouTube (losing one Facebook user will harm much less to Facebook then losing one Wikipedia author can harm to Wikipedia)

Thus I would definitely like to know how such people can be found, as people who are competent enough to do this most likely will not be willing to spend their time on dealing with harassment (and vice versa) — NickK (talk) 20:58, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Is there any reason why we need a new bureaucracy? Why can't we just use the existing stuctures of admins, oversighters etc? I appreciate that might need some training, and hopefullly we can recruit more female admins and improve the gender balance in the admin corps. But why shouldn't this be like vandalism or copyvio, some admins tend to specialise in it, some stay well away and others involve themselves from time to time. WereSpielChequers (talk) 21:21, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

First, privacy. There is a longer explanation of this in the proposal. Second, this is a matter of enforcement of the WMF terms of service and discrimination policy, not local wiki rules. This is standard HR stuff, I'm assuming it can be dealt with by a normal HR department. —Neotarf (talk) 22:49, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

That's a very bad idea. HR departments deal with issues between people they hired themselves, while here there should be someone to deal with issues between volunteers. We need a model for dealing with such issues in volunteer communities, not in large companies — NickK (talk) 23:03, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Oversight is pretty hot on Privacy where it is needed, have you seen how they deal with paedophilia related issues?. Of course sometimes Privacy isn't always the only consideration re a sexual harassment incident, sometimes you want it known that a particular editor got banned for a particular incident. But on the broader issue of why you want a centralised top down system in a decentralised global movement, firstly be aware that some of your opponents will be objecting because of the centralisation aspect. As for this being standard HR stuff, I've worked for multinational organisations where HR was a national function, and one where it was a hybrid between a global and a national model. I'm not convinced that a centralised HR system can work efficiently in a global organisation, the overheads on complying with national differences in currencies, culture, language and employment law would be excessive. Hence my suggestion that you work with the existing structures and look toenforce underenforced policies tighten policies that are inadequate, train functionaries and recruit more women to functionary roles. WereSpielChequers (talk) 08:46, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

There are no "existing structures" and there is no enforcement mechanism. Training, yes, we need that. Recruit women...well, it would certainly be easier to recruit more women--and to retain them--if there was a way to stop harassment. I have seen some good people leave --male and female both--because they just got tired of dealing with it all the time. —Neotarf (talk) 01:18, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

If experienced editors in good standing left as they got tired of dealing with harassment, what would be the retention rate for this group? I think that dealing with harassments in many languages, communities and cultural contexts should be extremely tiring, thus motivating this group should not be an easy job — NickK (talk) 02:11, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

This should be done by moderators with special training and according to specific criteria. —Neotarf (talk) 21:44, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Once again, where will these moderators come from? You seem to be looking for ideal moderators who never get tired, are completely unbiased and never make mistakes. Therefore such moderator can be either a bot (that will be able to globally lock for Terms of Use violations, but never manage to make linguistic analysis of the comment in question) or an expert with experience in linguistics and psychology, most likely one of those who perform linguistic analysis for courts. In theory second option is viable, although you will need some 600 experts, at least two per language edition as we are supposed to cover all editions and they are supposed to control each other. Any other method of appointment will most likely result in failure — NickK (talk) 17:21, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Unresolved issues

A list of suggestions for improving the proposal:

• More neutral language for all gender orientations. —Neotarf (talk) 23:01, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Neotarf: This one would be impossible, He and She are specific on most of this world language (these languages don't use "they" as neutral language for gender , example: in Indonesian if you use "they" trying to be neutral, people will see you as a weird person, we simply don't have this culture, also other example, if you use "they" on Aceh language trying to be neutral, they will get offended and I can assure you, that you will get punched by them), and genderqueer are not recognized on many language, I ask you, can you translate Genderqueer to Kazakh? have you read this Phab:T32442? This translatewiki:gender? And translatewiki:Thread:Support/New option in sign up form? Not all culture is the same with Western culture, please respect other people culture and do not marginalize their language, just because they don't have "neutral language for all gender orientations".--AldNonymous^Bicara? 23:20, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Ach, you caught me in the middle of editing a summary. I was going to move this, but since it already has a comment, I won't. The idea of "all gender orientations", as I interpret it, means more like people who don't identify as male or female, but as something else. As I understand it, it's still sort of an emerging concept, beyond LGBT, but the idea is to make everyone feel welcome. —Neotarf (talk) 23:52, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Oh I see, then it would be fine, well as long it won't be enforced to many local wikis (with non-english as main language). Wa'salam.--AldNonymous^Bicara? 00:07, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, yes it would apply to all wikis, but don't ask me to translate it to all of them :) It just means instead of using the words "male" and "female", we make a more general statement about respecting people regardless of gender. —Neotarf (talk) 01:25, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

So who would? And how do you do this whilst respecting community consensus and not doing things in a language that you don't understand that simply don't work for the people who do understand that language? WereSpielChequers (talk) 07:22, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

You can't be serious wanting this to apply on all wikis.--AldNonymous^Bicara? 09:25, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

The terms of service are not optional. You cannot opt out of them by consensus. The fact that this is not understood by the rank and file underscores the need for a more centralized enforcement. —Neotarf (talk) 21:40, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

It's like you want to force Religion A to convert to Religion B (sorry if it's sounds rude) but not all language in this world have "gender neutral" language, and "gender neutral" culture. So, if you force it, I can only see it as trying to burn Wikimedia down.--AldNonymous^Bicara? 17:26, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Stricter policies don't solve the issue

I get wanting to discourage harassment and make Wikimedia wikis more inviting to everyone, but I don't get what this is supposed to do that existing policies don't already do. I'm not saying that existing policies are 100% "effective", but there is a limit to what a written policy can do as far as encouraging people in an open environment.

There are several fatal flaws in this proposal. Nude images of women is a prime example of why you can't just arbitrarily "turn up" how harsh or strict a policy is. Some people will find a nude image to be sexist or off putting to some degree, but where do you draw the line? Is it okay for only some women who are not comfortable for it? What about religious editors who don't like any nudity? We can't just censor articles because of arbitrary values in a multicultural project. The existing policies already do a good job at making sure that the only time nudity is used is when it is appropriate to the article, and do so in a way that balances nearly all of these different concerns (especially NPOV..).

I'm not trying to discourage anyone here, but I think this proposal/idea is a dead end if your goal is to be more inclusive. -- Ned Scott (talk) 01:00, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

This has been mentioned in some of the above conversations as well. I have updated the proposal to try to make it more clear that this is not about articles, it is about the collaboration process. —Neotarf (talk) 21:42, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

See also

• Grants:IdeaLab/Community discussion on harassment reporting